Homiletics—the rhetorical art of preaching—stands near the center of literary, intellectual, and political culture in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium. This was an era marked by an extraordinary efflorescence in the writing and performance of rhetorical texts, and ensuring preacherly competence formed a major motivation for the new investment in higher education which drove that wider shift. Appointment to a metropolitan bishopric regularly served as the capstone of a learned career, giving those selected an opportunity to exercise their skills in composing and delivering sermons as leaders of congregations across the empire. At the same time, however, episcopal office brought these highly trained intellectuals and the rhetorical culture they embodied out of the elite circles of the court and capital and into direct contact with provincial communities organized along very different lines. Preaching lies at the heart of that encounter. As such, the practice and its surviving textual evidence have profound implications for the literary, social, and imperial history of this vital period.
This project investigates those implications for the first time. It focuses on four prominent bishop-authors: John Mauropous (ca. 1000–1080), Theophylaktos of Ohrid (ca. 1050–1126), Eustathios of Thessaloniki (ca. 1115–1195), and Michael Choniates (ca. 1138–1222). Each is among the most significant writers and intellectuals of his lifetime, and each composed sermons, still virtually unstudied, in his role as metropolitan bishop. Together, their careers cover the period from the revival of rhetoric at the turn of the millennium through the collapse of the empire in the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Their episcopal seats likewise span the breadth of the empire from inland Anatolia to the central Balkans, including two quite different cities in the Aegean heartland. Combining comparative approaches to preaching with recent advances in medieval Greek philology, the project will open up a new chapter in the history of public communication and, in doing so, transform our understanding of how artful speech acted as a medium of interconnection in this dynamic medieval polity.
*Fresco of Michael Choniates and Ignatios Theophoros, Hagios Petros in Kalyvia Kouvara, Attica, 1231–1232. Image credit: Theodora Konstantellou.